Why does work go undone when everyone is already there?
Headcount was not the problem. Still, some work went untouched. This is how I moved from assigning owners case by case to a standing structure.
Headcount was not the problem. Still, some work went untouched. Until last year I split work among people. Now I split it among programs. The method changed. At first, the same problem showed up again.
I used to assign an owner each time a new task came up. When something urgent landed, I created a role for it on the spot. Two things followed. The same work got done twice, in two places. And some work nobody touched at all. Duplication and gaps showed up together.
It was the same problem I had with a team of people. I changed the tool. The problem stayed. The cause was not the tool. It was how I assigned ownership, case by case, every time.
The second problem was approval. I handed work off, then kept getting asked mid task whether it was okay to proceed. Each question stopped the work. I said I had delegated it. In practice I was still holding every step.
| Item | Then | Now |
|---|---|---|
| People doing the work | About a dozen | Just me |
| Marketing and sales | Half a dozen people, split up | One program |
| Work needing my approval | Any time, mid task | Four things |
I stopped creating a role each time and built a standing structure instead.
I split the work among several programs. One program is like one staff member, in company terms. Running several of them and splitting work among them is called agent orchestration. It works the way a chief of staff assigns work to staff.
Some of them support me. The rest own one function each. Tech, knowledge, creative, marketing, business, research. It is close to a normal company org chart.
When I set the functions, I wrote down what each one does not do, next to what it owns. When I wrote only what it owned, the boundaries overlapped. Only after writing what it does not do could I see the gaps.
At the same time I redrew approval. I cut what needs my sign off to four things. Deletion, spend, outbound communication, business decisions.
A deletion does not come back. Money, once spent, is spent. Outbound communication goes out under my name. Business decisions rest on context only I have.
Everything else gets finished without asking, and the result comes to me. Cutting approval did not loosen control. It moved control onto the things that cannot be undone.
For me, that is what happened. I did not bring in a tool. I redrew the org chart.